A blog about making Adelaide, South Australia, safer and better for pedestrians and cyclists

Sunday, 14 August 2011

While we're talking about parking

When I have work to do, I very much enjoy procrastinating and finding interesting ways of putting it off. One of the best tools of this is Google Streetview. You can go on to the street in any city that has had a Google mobile drive through it. All of Australia is covered along with all of North America and a large chunk of Europe, Singapore, Japan and a whole bunch of other places.

I was checking out the design of some new suburbs in Denmark the other day and after crossing a bridge, came across a large shopping centre called Fisketorvet. This is the view from across the bridge:

As you would expect for a shopping centre of its size, it offers 2000 car parks. The first three hours are free. If you go to the cinema inside the complex, they will give you a free parking permit at the ticket office.

What is great is that bikes are not forgotten. The entrance is a u-shaped driveway that allows cars to come in and drop people off or pick them up. A wide bike path goes the who way around and then leads to separate, raised lanes over the bridge.

The bike path leads to a bike park with space for 600 bikes. It is difficult to find a picture so here is the Google Streetview image:

This is what choice looks like. How hard would it be to make this mandatory for new shopping centres and large shops? It would add nothing to the cost and its benefit is that it recognises the number of people who do arrive at these places using a transport method other than the car - or who would if they actually had a choice.